Mindful Teacher, Mindful School
Improving Wellbeing in Teaching and Learning
- Kevin Hawkins - Independent Educational Consultant and Trainer
With this guide to mindful practice, teachers new and experienced can learn how to use mindfulness in their own professional and personal lives as well as how to incorporate it in their teaching to support student well-being. Combining theory with practice and illustrated with real life stories, this guide will show readers:
- What mindfulness is
- The research and scientific evidence behind it
- How changing the way you approach situations can transform the way you feel
- How to manage stress, and look after yourself
- How teaching mindfully can help your students
- What mindfulness can do for the culture in your school
- Check out our free ebook A Little Guide to Mindfulness
- Read blog post How well are we? An Education System Under Stress
This book has a great deal to offer anyone with even the slightest curiosity as to what mindfulness entails and what it can offer.
If there is hope for deep societal change, it surely must rest on rethinking and recreating our industrial-age education system. It is within this context that we need to view the growing interest in mindfulness in schools, which could, potentially, help guide us toward a system of education truly oriented toward human development. But it could also end up as just another in a long line of educational fads. Work like that of Kevin Hawkins – based on the science and practice of cultivating mindfulness and grounded in extensive practical experience in schools - could tell the difference.
This book is a journey we need to go on in order to grow, learn and flourish as educators and learners. [...] Hawkins has filled my empty tank back up with hope and optimism for the future of our schools.
This book is written for teachers, by a teacher. Kevin truly understands the joys of teaching and the desire to make a real difference to students’ lives, as well as the challenges and risks of burnout that most teachers experience on a daily basis. It provides teachers with the essential skills for self-care that will allow them to thrive in their professional and personal lives. It also offers a straightforward, natural progression: from being mindful, to teaching mindfully and engaging students, to teaching students mindfulness, and finally developing and sustaining a mindful school culture. Mindful Teacher, Mindful School is an excellent resource for those who want to begin, or to deepen, their own personal mindfulness practice, and to share their practice with students and the wider school community.
Kevin has managed something I haven’t seen before in a book aimed at educators – he has combined theory with practice and real life stories and with a credibility borne out of experience. Without doubt, mindfulness will play a huge part in supporting the wellbeing of students and teachers. One of the best ways to incorporate mindfulness in a school is for teachers to experience and model it, before they teach it. Crucially, this book shows how to do exactly that...
In Mindful Teacher, Mindful School, Kevin Hawkins presents a rich developmental approach to educating the whole child. This book illustrates how mindfulness can enrich teaching and the lives of teachers and students. But Hawkins also is appropriately cautious in suggesting that teachers take time to develop their own practice and awareness. The book is full of practices that can help teachers and all educators embody mindfulness in their daily life. This is quite a gift!
Mindful Teacher, Mindful School, contains real depth of understanding about this important new mindfulness-based approach to education. Radiating from a central theme of teacher self-care, Kevin Hawkins invites the reader to explore the richness of truly international perspectives on mindful awareness and social emotional learning. In an easily readable and common sense fashion he skillfully weaves together research, practice exercises, educational applications, plus the author’s and other teachers’ own experiences. A rich and compelling tapestry, Mindful Teacher, Mindful School, is an essential text.
This is an elegant and practical guide to cultivating mindfulness in school. With great clarity, wisdom, and warmth, Kevin Hawkins illuminates the paths for being mindful, teaching mindfully and teaching mindfulness. This book explains both the science and practice of mindfulness in school context. It offers teachers not only helpful resources but also accessible steps towards transforming themselves, their students, and their schools.
The Mindful Teacher is an invaluable resource for educators. Through his own experience as a school leader and classroom teacher, Kevin Hawkins offers a comprehensive, inspiring, and practical approach that makes mindfulness accessible to anyone working in school based settings. Each chapter beautifully builds on each other and helps us see how mindfulness can be a vehicle for not only transforming education but making the world a better place.
What really matters in education? This book argues that it is educating the mind and heart, equipping the next generation not only with knowledge, but also with how to think, with qualities of curiosity, compassion, playfulness and resilience. Drawing on his immense repository of teaching experience and with deep humility Kevin Hawkins offers an invaluable toolkit for teachers and schools. Anyone using this toolkit will be standing on the shoulders of a a very skilful teacher who embodies what he teaches.
